Once again I have found another great add-on thanks to Gareon at GoFirefox! Last week he had posted a link to the article Mashable: 16 Great Music Add-Ons for Firefox. I had commented about FoxyTunes being one of the 16 and he mentioned he was trying out Fire.fm. The add-on allows you to control Last.fm (player) from within Firefox without having to have it opened in its own tab.
When I first installed the add-on I was not too happy as it added the Fire.fm toolbar to my browser. I didn’t like this taking up my screen-space (not that it really takes up that much when you are running 1440×900 resolution). However, after a little playing around I discovered once I right-clicked in an empty area on the toolbar I was able to move all the items around so they fit nicely within existing space (in my case on the menu bar in the empty area to the right of the menus). You can also setup so it will occupy the status bar, but I have my Foxy Tunes down there so it would have been a bit crowded. Although, now that I am listening to Last.fm, I hardly use WinAmp/Foxy Tunes now.
The add-on allows you to play your pre-set stations or start a new one, skip or love or ban the current track, stop the player and adjust the volume (which I don’t use since my keyboard has a volume control). It also has buttons to go to Last.fm home and to the log-in page. Plus it displays the current track’s title and artist, play progress with time remaining. Clicking on the artist’s name or song title will take you to the information on the Last.fm site. You can also be “notified” of each track with a slider with cover art, and track information. Which brings me to my only gripe about this add-on. By default anything you click that would take you to the last.fm site opens in the current tab. Sadly, there is no option to have the content open in a new tab. I have left this feedback at AMO, so hopefully in future versions there will be this option. Other than this it is a well built and very user friendly add-on
Fire.fm works with Firefox 3 and above (currently 3.5b4pre) and is 329 KB.
